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How to overcome the Insurance Industry’s main challenges

Spixii examines how to address the main challenges for insurance businesses to deliver better customer experiences, increased customer loyalty, greater process and operational efficiency, and greater profitability to gain a competitive advantage with Conversational Self-Serve Technology.

To become competitive, to attract and retain customers, insurance businesses have to do more to address customer pain points. With conversational self-serve technology insurers can address them in sales, customer service, and claims.

From a business intelligence perspective, they are primarily about the sharing of information with the insurer via, for example, email. Customers are also frustrated by long waiting times, and by the quality or speed of an insurer’s response to their queries. As customer calls, or messages increase, customer waiting, and insurer response times can often get worse – leading to a poor customer experience.

One answer is to use technology to implement a SaaS platform for insurance that enables self-serve and CPA. It is also important to ensure that not too many questions are asked of the customer, and to make sure that the processes aren’t too long, complex, and arduous. Insurers need to, for example, offer a quote in a way that informs each customer according to their needs to enable them to make the right decision and this necessitates showing the right information to each customer. This approach is aligned with the Financial Conduct Authority's guidelines.

Providing the right information can often be complex because filling in forms can be confusing. For example, a customer may not understand a term. “So, it’s important to have additional support available to enable the customer or prospect to ask questions and to chat with a human being,” advises Million - – CEO and Co-Founder of Spixii.

Filling in forms can create a fractured experience when it leads to a customer making a phone call, or to starting a conversation in a web live chat, and then to that customer being stuck on the phone or waiting for a live chat for clarification. He therefore suggests that the ability to self-serve, “using a chatbot, can help to educate the customer and to make the decision to buy a product, or resolve a query immediately, in a seamless experience and with confidence.”

Overcome the insurance industry's main challenges, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Pubished circa June/July 2022. 

How to unlock self-serve through Conversational Process Automation

To avoid any loss, automation needs to better serve the insurance customer and not become a barrier to communication with the insurance provider or broker. Done well, automation can be utilised to channel customers to the right place. Done badly, as can happen with Interactive Voice Response (IVR), customers can wait 20 or more minutes to then be connected with someone who’s not the expert they need to speak with, and so they end up being transferred to another person. Being pushed from pillar to post and having to wait on the phone for too long creates a bad experience.

To prevent this from happening it’s vital to set the level of expectations by asking customers the right questions, and make sure their waiting times are significantly reduced. They want to gain a quick resolution to their issues, whether that be through buying an insurance product or talking to someone to resolve a problem with their insurance policy. Customers want to be able to quickly and immediately access claims updates, and they want to find the answers to their questions.

Renaud Million - CEO and Founder of Spixii - says they will use other channels if their experience through one particular channel, such as IVR or even a chatbot is not good. At worst, they will jump ship to buy a competitor’s insurance products. To ensure this doesn’t happen, and to keep each customer happy, expectations have to be set appropriately.

At the end of the conversation, to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained and to allow for continuing improvements, the conversation should end with the question: “How likely are you to recommend us to others?” By setting expectations, and by connecting, even the approach behind IVR can be empowered to do what the end user wants to do.

Unlock 'self-serve' through Conversational Process Automation, read the complete blog on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa: June/July 2022. 

Customer-first: Exploring the Self-service Technology Landscape

Like most industries, digital transformation is changing insurance. Journalist, Polly Jean Harrison, writing for the Fintech Times on 5^th May 2022 about ‘The Top Tech Trends Transforming The Insurance Industry’ therefore claims it has never before more ripe for disruption than it has today. The charge for change is being led by Insurtech startups who lead with technology-first approaches. Arguably though, they need to lead with customer-first approaches by initially understanding how the implementation of technology impacts on customer experiences of insurance brands. 

This industry shake-up is nevertheless expected to change the industry forever. The start-ups are working on augmenting legacy systems, increasing robotic process automation (RPA), low-code/no-code developments, tailored digital products, and then there is Spixii’s ability to offer Conversational Process Automation (CPA) and its expertise in enhanced Conversational Self-Serve Technology.

Harrison writes: “Insurance companies are in a “digital race” as they rush to innovate to support better customer experiences. Agility has become a baseline to mark competitiveness in today’s insurance space...[insurance] companies are exploring AI-enabled tools to automate estimation and inspection. One instance of this is the use of telematics to offer greater levels of contextual information to aid smoother, faster, and more comprehensive claims settlements.”

“More and more agents and brokers are turning to digital tools; at the same time, customer demand is skyrocketing with the emergence of self-service digital channels. A McKinsey survey conducted in 2020 of European insurance executives, revealed that 89 per cent of respondents expect a significant acceleration in digitisation, and most also foresee a further shift in channel mix.”

She argues that the fully tech-enabled insurers of the near-future will be unrecognisable when compared to today’s organisations: “The fact of the matter is that inefficient, manual processes have to go. Paper-pushing may have been the norm in the insurance industries for centuries, but this is no longer feasible. These archaic channels cannot be seen as necessary evils anymore, with digital solutions right here under our noses and being normalised more and more each day.”

Explore more, read the complete article on Spixii's website. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa June/July 2022. 

E-book: How to enable true self-serve in insurance

Before any discussion about how insurers can enable true ‘self-serve’ in the insurance industry, it’s imperative to define what it means. It’s about improving the customer experience and reducing operating costs in insurance by allowing the end user, the prospect of an insurance company, to be able to perform a task using self-service tools. The same applies to brokers. To increase their effectiveness and efficiencies they also need to have the right resources to better serve their clients.

Spixii CEO, Renaud Million, explains: “Having the ability to self-serve gives insurance customers the ability to complete a task online such as to get a quote, or to buy a policy, or to log a claim or to make amendments to the policy. All these tasks, if they couldn’t do them online, would be undertaken through the traditional channels of email or over the phone. Self-serve, self-service, offers the ability to perform tasks online whenever they want, and from whatever device they wish to use.”

Learn why 'self-serve' improved the customer experience, read the complete article. Download the E-Book to learn 'How to enable true self-serve in insurance'. 

Client: Spixii. Published circa June/July 2022. 

From insurance to cryptocurrencies in healthcare

Beyond his work with TU Automotive and Trudy Darwin Communications, between 2020 and 2022, Graham Jarvis - freelance business and technology journalist, wrote and edited insurtech reports for Intelligent Insurer; wrote articles on cryptocurrencies in healthcare; wrote about education; edited and wrote fleet management reports for ABAX; wrote about digital accessibility; wrote about cloud computing; wrote about customer experiences and customer management; wrote about connected, autonomous vehicles and smart cities. Other topics were also covered. 

Banking: Why Freedom of Choice is Needed in the Industry

Banks are traditionally known for being slow to innovate, leaving them with slow processes and outdated applications. Even though the European Union’s Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) requires banks to open up their payments infrastructure and customer data assets to third parties, the traditional view often sticks. Large banks are therefore still viewed as being monopolistic in their behaviour and in what they offer their customers.

Find out how banks can change, read this interview with bunq’s founder Ali Niknam and featuring Chris Skinner - independent commentator on the financial markets and fintech. 

Published by The Economist in a supplement about the Future of Banking Payments in 2019. Author: Graham Jarvis. Client: Noahs Media. Produced for bunq. 

 

WhatsApp Doc? Why WhatsApp Isn’t A Threat to Live Chat

Mobile apps are great, but people often just want to ask a quick question and then go.

People don’t mind downloading apps they’ll use frequently, but they do if they just want to ask a quick question about an issue they require help to resolve. Despite claims from the likes of Webio that mobile apps such as Messenger and WhatsApp will see the demise of live chat, there is room for both an app-based customer messaging platforms and live chat.

Find out why more about WhatsApp isn't a threat to live chat, Read the complete article to find out more.

Published by IT Pro Portal on 9th April 2019. Article by-lined to Gemma Baker, Marketing Executive at Click4Assistance.  

2019: Top Five Trends in Customer Service Improvement

Over quite a few years now many customers, for certain types of purchases, have often visited a store before making a purchase online.

With retailers struggling on the High Street, while e-commerce ramps up, the role of the contact centres is likely to become increasingly important for sales, marketing and customer service. This means that online customer service tools will play a key part in capturing customer footfall online, improving customer experience and in creating loyal and profitable customers.

However, does this mean the High Street now needs to move completely online, or does it still have a role to play? Over quite a few years now many customers, for certain types of purchases, have often visited a store before making a purchase online to gain access to better prices, or to gain more convenience...

Find out more about what the 5 top trends in customer service improvement will be in 2019. 

Published by IT Pro Portal on 28th February 2019. Author: Graham A. Jarvis. 

How to Meet Customer Expectations with Live Chat

Get it wrong, and you could find that potentially loyal customers will just prefer to talk to your competitors. So, find out how to do it right. 

Published by IT Pro Portal. By-lined to Gemma Baker, Marketing Executive at Click4Assistance.

Measuring the Customer Success of Live Chat: Tips, Strategies and Best Practice

Online marketing offers many advantages over its traditional brethren from a metrics perspective. You can, for example, examine click-through-rates to a promotion, to a blog or to an article to your website, and with eCommerce you then analyse whether that online interaction has led to a number of sales. At the core of this marketing effort is also the ability to collate customer data, which can be used with the help of a customer relationships management (CRM) system to learn more about your customers to improve sales and customer service to develop profitable customer relationships.

To achieve the same level of data collation and analysis with traditional offline marketing techniques would take much more time, effort and money. It’s also often said that customers have become more demanding because the vast majority of us is able to connect to the internet while on the move via our smartphones, tablet devices and laptops. This customer requirement for immediacy therefore brings us to the benefits of offering live chat as one of the ways for offering them an omnichannel experience, and to improve the ability of companies to resolve customer queries and issues.

To find out how to measure the success of live chat, click here.

Published by MarketingTech magazine on 10th January 2019. Author: Graham Jarvis. Client: Click4Assistance